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Rilke, Rainer Maria - 12 Third Elegy
Identifier
015333
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Herbert James Draper
A description of the experience
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke [The Third Elegy]
To sing the beloved is one thing, another, oh,
that hidden guilty river-god of the blood.
What does he know, himself, of that lord of desire,
her young lover, whom she knows distantly,
who often out of his solitariness,
before the girl soothed him, often, as if she did not exist,
held up, dripping, from what unknowable depths,
his godhead, oh, rousing the night to endless uproar?
O Neptune of the blood, O his trident of terrors.
O the dark storm-wind from his chest, out of the twisted conch.
Hear, how the night becomes thinned-out and hollow.
You, stars, is it not from you that the lover’s joy in the beloved’s face rises?
Does he not gain his innermost insight,
into her face’s purity, from the pure stars?